Earlier this week, I spent half a day with Basic Training photographing a Nav\Med exercise. I put together a 5-photo essay that is posted on the ALERT training blog here.

I felt that the story would be better told in a 10-shot essay. Given the current format for presentation on the ALERT website, this wasn’t really an option, so I chose 5 photos. For y’all here, you can see the full story in 10 shots:

You can note the cool motion-blurred flash effect that I described earlier today.

This was a challenging day of shooting for a couple reasons. First of all was the pouring rain. Typically, when it starts raining, I stay inside. Something about carrying $2,800 of non-waterproof camera gear makes me a little skittish even in a light drizzle. To say nothing of the absolute deluge on Tuesday. I really didn’t want to miss the events though, so I came up with a way to safely shoot in the rain. Look for a post later today on how I did this.

It was also challenging from the sheer perspective of hiking back to the middle of nowhere in lush green wilderness, way off the beaten path. I realized that I love this kind of adventure photojournalism. It is really awesome. I love it.

So, I am way behind on uploading my stories here. I am staying on top of workflow, thanks to the lessons learned at PhotoJ. Anyway, here is a 5-shot essay on the Basic Training River Crossing Competition:

These same photos showed up on ALERT’s website as Basic Training Unit 39 – Day 29

Since we had several thousand people here on campus for the Regional ATI Conference, ALERT’s recruiting staff decided to use the opportunity to introduce many to the unique aspects of our different programs through the hands-on Challenge Day experience.

For me, this was a unique opportunity to put into practice what I had learned during the Photojournalism workshop. I preplanned my shoot, and then shot all day, eight hours of straight shooting. 1,558 photos. I did run into some unique challenges (including the fact that I felt absolutely dead tired exhausted), and I have a number of instructions for my IPS instructors, but overall, the day went well. I keyworded all my photos last night and then rated them today. I got some good stuff and I am happy with how my day went.

I did put together a photo essay describing the day, and since I wasn’t put to a limit, I went with 15 photos (with captions). You can view it here. (opens link in new window).

Having heard great reports from past students, I decided to take the IPS Photojournalism course this week at the Regional ATI conference here on campus.

Our first day covered the history of photojournalism (very cool) and the compositional tools available to us to tell stories. These tools are amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Like most IPS courses, we had to shoot for assignments. We were limited to 48 photos, no deletions (which was very challenging) and had to come back with 5 images illustrating the 5 concepts.

I ended up shooting two cohesive sets of images:

Ryan:

These images came out of about 45 minutes spent tagging along with Ryan and basically getting photos of him and what he was doing:

Aquatics:

I figured that the AQ unit might be doing something interesting, so I gave my buddy Dave (former roomie and current AQ unit leader) a call and learned that they were going on a dive. I was very interested in this, so I tagged along and picked up some cool shots.